Merkel says trust must be restored after reports of U.S. spying

Eric Feferberg / Agence France-Pressse / Getty Images

French President Francois Hollande, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, shown arriving Thursday at a meeting of European leaders, both have had telephone conversations with President Obama this week about accusations of massive U.S. spying in their countries and elsewhere.

French President Francois Hollande, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, shown arriving Thursday at a meeting of European leaders, both have had telephone conversations with President Obama this week about accusations of massive U.S. spying in their countries and elsewhere. (Eric Feferberg / Agence France-Pressse / Getty Images)

Henry Chu

LONDON — Declaring that “spying among friends is absolutely not OK,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that trust between her government and the Obama administration would need to be rebuilt after reports that U.S. intelligence agencies might have tapped her cellphone.

Amid signs of anger from close allies over mass electronic surveillance, Germany’s Foreign Ministry also summoned U.S. Ambassador John B. Emerson to make clear its displeasure. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said afterward that he had demanded ”these activities that have been reported will be comprehensively investigated. We need the truth now.”

Arriving at a meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels, Merkel said that she had “repeatedly made clear to the American president [that] spying among friends is absolutely not OK. I said that to him in June when he was in Berlin, also in July, and yesterday in a telephone call.”

“We need trust among allies and partners,” she added. “Such trust must now be built anew.”

Merkel’s phone call with Obama was his second such conversation this week -- the first was with the president of France -- in which the American leader has had to soothe a European counterpart over revelations of spying on foreign nations on a gigantic scale by the National Security Agency.

German officials have poured scorn on the White House’s assurance that the U.S. is not currently monitoring Merkel’s cellphone and has no intention of doing so in the future, a statement that, the officials noted, did not answer whether such eavesdropping had occurred in the past. Merkel is known as an avid user of her cellphone for calls and text messages.

Her government has not elaborated on how it came to believe that the U.S. might have tapped her phone, but the German news magazine Der Spiegel says that it had sparked the chancellor’s concern with inquiries it made to her administration about suspected eavesdropping. The magazine has published a number of stories on U.S. spying based on the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Obama’s earlier call to French President Francois Hollande came after a newspaper reported Monday that, according to documents leaked by Snowden, U.S. intelligence agencies had scooped up more than 70 million pieces of data on French phone communications within a 30-day period beginning at the end of last year.

A French government minister called such spying “totally unacceptable,” and Hollande’s government also summoned the U.S. ambassador to France for an explanation.

Whether the contretemps will cause any real or lasting damage to ties between the U.S. and two of its closest European allies remains to be seen. Some analysts say the outraged reactions by leaders on the continent are more about posturing and catering to public opinion at home than a real rupture of relations in a world where countries, even allied ones, routinely spy on one another.

German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere made a point of saying in a television interview that “the Americans are and remain our best friends,” though he added the now-expected caution that spying by such a close ally was “absolutely not right.”

Daniela Schwarzer, an analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, said that the atmosphere at the moment is brittle.

“Trust was deeply shattered when the whole information was disclosed earlier this summer,” she said, referring to Snowden’s revelations. “Yes, we all know everyone is spying, but the degree of that is so encompassing that there has been a big issue with trust.”

“The consensus in Germany is still that a good transatlantic relationship is what we want,” she added, but “the trust issue is still there.”

Schwarzer noted that negotiations for a free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, were dragged down this year as a result of the Snowden's disclosures.

“In France, the public debate went as far as being, ‘Look, we cannot possibly negotiate TTIP with America now, because they know everything about our strategy.’ So this goes very far in the political debate,” Schwarzer said. “Trust definitely needs to be rebuilt, and I think the Europeans will ask for something in the field of data protection where the U.S. needs to give something.”

U.S. officials declined Thursday to predict what Germany might do in response, but they noted that the two countries had agreed to work on intelligence privacy issues.

A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, Karl Bergner, said Germany was waiting for a U.S. explanation of what had taken place, and there has been no other official discussion of possible action by German officials.